Today we removed most of our stuff from the clevercactus office, in preparation for a full shutdown early next week. I've already switched over the server to a placeholder page. Email will still work, at least for a while, and we'll do our best to ease the transition for our current users. We apologize to them in particular, but there was no way to keep the service running without significant investment in time and money, and we just couldn't handle it. That's how things go sometimes.

The last two and a half years have been an incredible experience, and I'm thankful for everything. To my business partner, Paul, and to everyone that was with us along the way, our families, friends, the design team at huskit, and of course the users: thanks. Really.

And now on to the next big thing...

If you're trying to get through to clevercactus and can't please let me know through a comment or email to my personal address.

What happened is that we were attacked (I'm not sure when) and someone left a number of scripts there that are flooding the system (they do other things too, but at least one of them is clearly written simply to flood the network and disable it). This is something obviously intended to bring down clevercactus, not just a simple hacking. Why? What do they gain by bringing down the service of a small company that is going through hard times?

This kind of thing makes me sad, and is really discouraging.

I had this whole thing planned for today, getting the manifold site up and so on but now I'm going to spend time trying to see how to route around the problem for now until we can determine the extent of the hack. I don't even know how they got in yet--we constantly update our software with the latest patches. Needless to say, I'm seriously reconsidering the whole of the software I use and how to set it up so that this doesn't happen again.

Anyway. We'll see how it goes.

One of the comments I've heard most since yesterday has to do with the funding thing. As Dave said, "Consumer focused companies are always difficult to get funding for in Europe". I can definitely attest to that. Lots of enterprise and "vertical" focus, and generally low tolerance for the risk/opportunity equation presented by those opportunities. To their credit, VCs are very candid about this, so it's not as if it's a secret or anything.

One thing we tried to get across is that we'd be totally open to moving to the US if that's what it took to get funded. We'd have no problem with that. But then again, not being there, it's hard to get in the door.

But the "virtuous cycle" created by Silicon Valley is hard to beat. One of the conclusions I will take away from this experience is that all the talk about the "Indian Silicon Valley" or "European Silicon Valley" or "[Insert geolocation here] Silicon Valley" is just plain ridiculous. There isn't a place like it in terms of investors, press, talent, etc., all deeply interconnected (well, maybe a couple of places in the US come close, namely the Seattle/Redmond area, Route 128, and NYC). I remember going to Il Fornaio in Palo Alto and just feeling it. It's where things happen. (Plus it ain't a bad place to eat).

So: there's only one Valley, the rest are close, but no dice. :)

Now for the extended version.

For the last couple of months (and according to our plan) we have been looking for funding. Sadly, we haven't been able to get it. This hasn't just been a matter of what we were doing or how (although that must be partly a problem) but also a combination of factors: the funding "market" in Europe and more specifically in Ireland (what people put money into, etc), our target market (consumer) and other things. Suffice it to say that we really tried, and, well, clearly it was a possibility that we wouldn't be able to find it.

On top of this, I haven't been quite myself in the last few weeks, maybe even going back to September (and my erratic blogging probably is a measure of that). By then I was quite burned out. Last year was crazy in terms of work, and this one was no different: between January and the end of July I only took two days off work (yes, literally, a couple of Sundays) and the stress plus that obviously got to be too much. I see signs of recovery, but clearly this affected how much I could do in terms of moving the technology forward in recent weeks. Since there's only two of us, and it's only me coding (my partner deals with the business side of things), this wasn't the most appropriate time to have a burnout like that. I screwed up in not pacing myself better. Definitely a lesson learned there.

At this point, the company is running out of its seed funding and we don't have many options left. Even though it's possible that something would happen (e.g., acquisition), what we'll be doing now is to stop full time work on the company, which after all won't be able to pay for our salaries much longer, and look for alternatives since of course we need to, you know, buy food and such things. The service will remain up for the time being, and I'll try to gather my strength to make one last upgrade (long-planned) to the site and the app, if only just for the symmetry of the thing. Plus, you can't just make a service with thousands of users disappear overnight. Or rather, you can, but it wouldn't be a nice thing to do.

Now I have a few weeks before things get tight, and I'll use that time to get in the groove again and hopefully find something new to do that not only will help pay for the bills but is cool as well. Who knows? I might even end up in a different country! As I said at the beginning, if you know of something that I might find interesting, please send it my way. Both email and comments are fine (my email address can be found in my about page).

In the meantime, I'm going to start blogging more. No, really. I have some ideas I want to talk about, and maybe I can get back into shape by coding (or thinking about) something fun and harmless.

Or, as the amended H2G2 reads: Mostly harmless. :)

There's still much to do of course, there are some known problems with view updates under some circumstances, and new challenges that emerge from updating Atom support up to 0.3 (a few Atom 0.3 feeds confuse the parser by including XHTML un-escaped within the content element--they are labeled as xhtml+xml yes, so it's parser refinement that has to be done).

Now my focus goes back for the most part to share. There's some bugs to fix, improvements to make, and some important features to add (among those expose support for multiple locations for a single identity).

But for now--a bit of rest. Tomorrow I have to catch up with email and comments that were posted yesterday, particularly to the JList and StAX posts from a few days ago.

Phew!

I was just final dogfood testing the upcoming new release of clevercactus pro on my own data and it made me happy enough that I decided to post about it.

Btw, by "dogfood testing" I mean passing the "eat your own dogfood" test, which stands for completely switching over to (and relying on) the shiny new widget that you're about to unleash on the world.

One of the major changes on the new release of pro is on performance+memory usage (which are closely related when dealing with a memory-managed environment). Previous releases of pro, while efficient, started to be a burden when getting to a certain DB size. In my case, with about 15,000 items on my mail store, pro regularly used up all of the available memory in the VM. It did work when constraining the available memory, but the point is not to work past the limit but never to reach the limit at all. So the last few days I've concentrated on further improving that aspect of it.

While I have been using the app myself for a while now --months actually--, I've relied on the previous version as well, just in case. Finally, today, I flipped the switch for good and ceremoniously deleted the previous version from my system. All that remained was double-checking the effect of the upgrades, including the most recent changes.

Lo and behold, when I loaded the database and checked memory usage the app was holding at around 15 MB for regular usage and peaking at around 50 MB when poking it hard enough. Over time, usage dropped down back to 15 MB. And minimizing it, that is, eliminating the memory needs of display, etc, usage dropped down to literally nothing: 2 MB.

Much work remains, and while you might argue (rightly so) that this only brings the app to par with others, it's still a small rush when it's your code that is doing it.

Yeah, I'm happy about the new RSS/Atom parser, or the other many improvements in it, but this was a long-standing goal that I'm glad to finally cross off the list.

Anyway, I'm itching to get this rev out and concentrate back on share. Now for a bit of rest--more tomorrow!

So what was I doing? Simple: working on a new release of clevercactus pro. Not that share is taking a back-seat or anything, mind you, this is something that we had planned for a while and finally there was time to do it. (The release will be out sometime next week).

Anyway--I have had a couple of posts swirling in my head for a couple of days now, so I'll get to that now. :)

This has kept me quite busy the last few days--now for a short break (and maybe some more blogging :)).

Erik, here (and more recently here) who also has given us great ideas and comments. Russ, noting some of the initial performance and L&F issues among other things (and who hung in there even when strange things seemed to be happening with his installation). Cristian, Frank , and Jim, all of them with nice comments. Don, who quickly came up with a wonderful idea for wishlists (which, sadly, I haven't added yet, but it's never been off my mind), and then followed up later with more detail (and some excellent questions and comments as usual). Dylan, who posted a long review, with many ideas and good criticism. Anne, with a great analysis of some of the sociable ideas in share. Also, Justin, and James.

Once again, thanks to them and to the many others that I can't link to (either because they don't have a weblog, or because they made comments privately through email) -- share is better today because of their help and feedback.

More later. :)

So, without further ado, here's entry on the cactus log that discusses the release.

Now, most of the changes are in place and we have been fixing certain problems, such as linux install issues (noted in the newly-released clevercactus forums). But there's still a lot to do: documentation (particularly in what relates to firewalls, connectivity, etc), config options, and improving portions of the app and features.

Anyway. Back to work.

ps: Happy Bloomsday!

Almost there!

ps: the link should go to the cactus log, but it might not work if the new DNS information hasn't reached you yet. Shouldn't take long though. :)

Tired but happy is an accurate description of how I feel. Stay tuned!

Strictly speaking, the anniversary was that of the the "public release" of the company and product. Things don't happen on a clear-cut timelines, but it's nice to mark milestones.

Now, I had thought about it on and off for the last few weeks, but of course I had to actually get to the day to forget about it -- and about mentioning it! But since I have an irrepresible need to come up with something clever (no pun intended :)) to say, I'll just use my faulty memory as an excuse and make this an entry about the year that begins, as well as a celebration of the year that's gone by.

One year! Wow. Thanks to everyone who has helped us get here!

The best is yet to come. :)